What I Learned From Watching People Get Rejected

A candidate, hopeful, waiting on news. A rejection, or worse, silence where a rejection should have been. This moment has stayed with me more than almost anything else.

There's a specific moment in a hiring process that I've watched happen more times than I could count, and it never stopped affecting me the way it did the first time. A candidate, hopeful, waiting on news. A rejection, or worse, silence where a rejection should have been. And a version of that person, somewhere, quietly recalibrating what they thought they were worth.

I don't think most people on the hiring side intend any cruelty in this. Rejection is a necessary, unavoidable part of any selection process — not everyone can get the role, and pretending otherwise helps no one. What's stayed with me isn't the fact of rejection. It's how often the rejection itself was handled without any real thought for the person receiving it a template, a delay, a silence that let someone's hope quietly rot instead of being addressed directly.

I've made those calls myself, more times than I'd like to count. The easy ones were easy. The harder ones someone who'd clearly put real effort in, someone who asked a thoughtful follow-up question I didn't have a good answer for those stayed with me longer than they probably should have.

I've come to believe that how you treat someone at the exact moment they're not getting what they wanted says more about you, and about a system, than how you treat someone who's succeeding. It's easy to be kind to people you're about to make happy. It's a genuine test of character, and of design, to be kind to someone you're about to disappoint.

This has shaped how I think about almost everything I care about building. Not the celebratory moments those tend to take care of themselves. The rejection moments. The waiting moments. The gaps where someone's dignity is most at risk of being an afterthought to whoever's managing the process.

I don't have a clean solution for this yet. But I know, with more certainty than almost anything else I believe about this work, that it matters more than most of what gets optimized for instead.